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Blurb: “The domestic goddess is back and this time it’s instant”, “Once you’ve seen what Nigella can do for you in 20 minutes, you’ll never want anything else”.

Cooked from it before? Yes, fewer than 5 times.

Recipe: Lazy Loaf.

This is Nigella’s first appearance here, I have several of her books so I’ll try and space them out a little. As you’d expect from the Domestic Goddess the book is a stylish affair with luscious photography, and Lawson’s trademark style of writing, which I personally really enjoy. Recipes are grouped into themes such as “retro rapido” for classic dishes and “on the run” for packed lunches.

The majority of recipes don’t have long lists of ingredients which are easily available but for some reason this book just hasn’t grabbed me. This may be because although the ingredients are easily available they aren’t the sort of thing I have in the house, and don’t see the point of going out to buy them for a supposedly quick dinner. So, finding us low on bread and the shops closed I thought I’d try the lazy loaf recipe, which as well as promising fabulous bread with minimal effort also uses ingredients we actually had, yeast, muesli, bread flour and milk.

With no kneading, and no proving time the mixing stage is very simple; everything in a bowl and stir.

The cooking is slightly more complex, needing a temperature change part way through but otherwise it does live up to its promised ease. Here is the finished loaf…

The recipe does say the loaf will be dense and it is, but in a similar way to a non yeasted bread. Also despite containing yeast it doesn’t rise much. The loaf goes into a cold oven which I may be to give it a little time to rise but don’t expect a loaf with lots of oomph. The muesli gave added texture and the occasional nugget of dried fruit was a welcome addition. The loaf was really tasty, it lasted well and toasted nicely, we mainly ate it for breakfast but I think it would have gone well with cheese too making it a good all rounder too.

Cook it again? Yes but I’m still not sure anything else has caught my eye.

I’ll be honest I’m not sure why I bought this book! It was a random purchase from a garden centre. It may have been the promise of Romanian recipes, I taught English there for two summers and have very fond memories, but it turns out there are only really two recipes from Romania. The rest have very little information about their heritage, although it is spilt into chapters for each country or area. That said it is a book about cooking not culture, history or anthropology and a £4.99 maybe you get what you pay for.

Disappointed, less than enamoured by the dated looking photography and falling into the trap of assuming everything would be heavy and potato based this book languished on the shelf. It has been cold this week and The Man said he would like something hearty and warming so this book finally had it’s chance to impress with Hungarian Goulash.

The recipe has a simple list of ingredients, only specifying that beef should be used, Lamb makes it a different type of goulash and flour should not be used so the finished dish is a thin stew and any thickness coming from the potato breaking down. The recipe instructions were clear and simple but didn’t give too much guidance e.g chopped onions leaves a lot of room for interpretation but equally creativity and is in keeping with the no frills theme of the rest of the book.

The goulash was simple to cook, and didn’t require much attention or stirring etc; although I did fail to judge how much it would make and switched pans.

Given my initial scepticism about this book and it’s potential I was really surprised by how tasty this was.

Rich, warming and flavoursome, perfect in cold weather and I’d imagine very welcome in the depths of a Hungarian winter. The Man was surprised and impressed too. The only let down for me were the dumplings, yes that’s what you can see floating in there. I raised my eyebrows at these from the start as they only contain plain flour and egg, no seasoning or additional flavour. I found them chewy and gluey and lacking in flavour. Rib sticking? Yes, tasty ? No! Perhaps if I’d made them smaller, like very small pasta it would have been better but I’d leave them out next time.

Cook it again: Yes and there are a couple of puddings I’d like to make including sweet cheese dumplings but I have a feeling it will be a while before I do.

I picked this off the shelf because the first response I got from a friend on facebook was that I should cook Spag Bol and this seemed the most obvious choice from a number of contenders!*

I think this is a gorgeous book, very stylishly presented with beautiful photography but full of detail and quality recipes.

Each recipe is prefaced with some background, tips about key ingredients or an anecdote giving the book a more conversational style and means you learn something extra as well as how to cook the dish.

As you can see Caldesi’s recipe has a relatively small number of ingredients which are all easy to get hold of. It also includes chicken livers (the dark red mass to the right of the picture) and milk both more traditional ingredients in Bologna but which certainly weren’t in the versions of this my mum used to make!

I wouldn’t say the book as a whole it is aimed at completely novice cooks, the recipes do assume some knowledge and confidence especially for more technical procedures like butterflying a leg of lamb but Katie Caldesi takes you through everything in clear steps. This recipe would be a great way into the book as it is straight forward, but delivers a depth of flavour (I think thanks to the chicken livers and milk) which sets it apart from other versions.

For offal-phobes the liver is chopped very finely cooks down so you can’t taste it as an individual element but it gives an underlying richness and deeper flavour to the dish as does the milk. It does take a while to cook, around 2 hours, but it doesn’t need to be watched closely so you aren’t tied to the hob keeping an eye on it.

This is the final result.

A lovely, rich ragu, impressive given the lack of herbs and garlic I would normally put in. The meat is really the star of this recipe which is relatively light on tomato which doesn’t dominate here as they can in other versions.

Would I cook from it again? Yes and then some. There’s a recipe for an Oxtail dish from Rome which I will be trying very soon.

*Further book choices will be made in a similarly random manner.

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The Man and I have a lot of cookery books, I knew this. I just didn’t quite realise the scale of our collection. Every New Year I like to have a sort out and a tidy up, it helps me deal with the passing of the old year and helps me start the new one with the impression of being more organised. Today I counted the books on our cookery book shelves, yep specific cookery book shelves (I was chuffed to bits when I found our new flat had the perfect set of shelves so they could all be together in one place). Here they are … all 85 of them!!!

I find them oddly comforting books and many have memories attached to them; we pick them up on holiday, people have give them as presents, some are impulse purchases, others longed for volumes. They range from the sublime, hello Fat Duck Cookbook to the ridiculous; I’m looking at you Favourite WV Campervan Recipes ! Shamefully some have been forgotten, never cooked from and the shelves are getting taken over with all kinds of other bits and pieces.

If nothing else this is a waste of money and space, but I do think I would struggle to work out which to give away. So … for the next 85 weeks I aim to cook at least one recipe from a different each week.

Maybe by the end of this I’ll have worked out which books I can live without, (to make space for some more), but I hope it will also encourage me to try some new recipes and ingredients and add some more dishes to the list of ones we have regularly. I hope you’ll find it interesting and fun to follow. I’m sure it won’t be plain sailing and there are some interesting retro books in my collection which I’m going to have steel myself to cook from, but I did buy them!

If anyone has any ideas about how I pick where to being I’d love to hear from you? Would you start alphabetically? By date published? What do you think?

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